#but they didn't develop the characters enough. so instead of s1 where the messages were blatantly obvious

[givemewallywestorgivemedeath]

Feeling very violent rn so here's a very controversial opinion:

Everything after season one of Young Justice sucked.

Look, I know I'm obsessed with the show but that doesn't mean it's good, it means that I'm too deep into it at this point to get out. There are good moments within the other seasons but in general? They were not good.

I'm sorry. I understand that they wanted to be creative and have a neat narrative and deep lore and all that. And they do! The narrative and lore is extremely deep.

But the plot? The characters??

Season one was an actual functional show that balanced character development, plot and dialogue with world building, lore and messaging.

The other seasons do not do that.

Season two bounced back and forth between like 16 characters. We got some development for some characters but even that was minimal compared to the character development in S1. And this isn't me complaining that the og group wasn't in S2 enough. That's not my issue. I would've loved to focus on a new group and I think that Jaime, Bart, Ed and Gar would've been super cool to focus on. I loved what character development they did have and I craved more.

But the problem? The problem is when you have 16 fucking characters that you are trying to develop and shove into a coherent plot and have actual meaningful scenes. There just wasn't enough focus on S2. Imo, S2 was meh because the characters got left by the wayside. The plot, dialogue, world building, lore and messaging was fine, there just seemed to be a lack of heart/warmth in the show because of the characters. It's hard to get invested.

Then holy shit. S3 introduced more characters. And the plot got more contrived and 'big picture' to the point that it started to abstract. It felt like nothing mattered. There were no stakes, you were just watching things happen. There was 50 fucking things happening an episode and 80% of it was lore/world building. It felt like I was studying for a fictional history exam.

I'm pretty sure the main character in S3 was earth 16. Just the entire universe. Because goddamn. We checked in on almost every living being and EVERYTHING was a plot point. Most of it wasn't even relevant to anything happening in the season. Man it was.... it was bad.

And at that point it just wasn't enjoyable at all to watch. I probably should've stopped watching but at that point the sunk cost fallacy had already kicked in. I knew it could be good. Maybe it could be good again. And people were constantly praising it as cinematic genius so I was like 'okay well maybe I'm missing the point? Maybe you aren't supposed to enjoy shows? Maybe this is fine?'

But season four broke me.

The creators heard that people were frustrated by the lack of character focus and the episodes following 72 characters and the episodes switching between 50 different subplots every episode and their solution? Their solution was to take allllllll the different unconnected plots and, instead of evenly spreading them throughout the season, jam them all into 'arcs'. So you had a bunch of mini seasons consisting of 3-5 episodes dedicated to a cast of ~5-8 characters (some of them new). And each of these episodes had unconnected a plots, b plots and c plots.

THAT IS NOT A SOLUTION

Holy shit that is not a solution.

Not to mention the overarching plot of the season, in which we had no fucking clue what was happening until the final episodes where everything became a speedrun to wrap everything up. We literally had no idea what the main plot was until it was ending.

Good god it was bad. It's bad writing!

I know people liked it and good for them. You should like what you like and you don't have to justify it. But for me it was insanity. I'm sorry I actually don't want a season long subplot where Beast Boy is depressed and sleeps all day. I would be cool with it if it had anything to do with the larger story but, surprisingly, spending five minutes watching Beast Boy sleep every episode didn't make for compelling storytelling.

I'm still not over how we didn't even know who the main villain was until the end of the season. And then all of a sudden he does a villain monologue to tell everyone his evil plan and his motives. Super cool actually. I love it when I have no idea what the stakes are for the majority of a show. It's incredibly good storytelling when you leave the audience in the dark about a major player in the plot for all of the plot. And then doing an info dump evil monologue in the final episodes to rush through the explanation??? Fucking fantastic and not a sign of terrible pacing at all.

I'm just so frustrated. The show isn't about being a show anymore. The show is an entire cinematic universe shoved into 20 something episodes. It's desperate to tell every single story at once, audience, pacing and good writing be damned.

I'm so tired of the constant praising of Greg. His whole 'i don't write endings because life doesn't have endings' and 'i don't write cliffhangers, I just leave things open ended' thing is pretentious bullshit. I'm tired of pretending it's not. A good story has an ending. Stories are not life! Some of the best shows I've ever watched had planned endings. And oh my god. The cliffhanger thing... that's just semantics my guy. Greg you write cliffhangers. You can insist they aren't but I'm going to call a spade a spade.

It's also.... I'm fine with explaining things, in fact I love it because it's an excuse to talk about the stuff I love, and I have a fairly decent knowledge of comic book lore. So, I could not only understand what was happening in the show but I was also super enthusiastic about explaining it to people. But hey Greg? Hey buddy? If 90% of your audience doesn't know what the fuck is going on and needs to be familiar with super specific obscure comic characters from the 70's then you might have a problem.

I think I realized halfway through s4 that the most enjoyment I got from an episode was when an obscure comic character would cameo in it. But then I realized that a) they generally weren't explained at all and b) 50% of the time they weren't just hanging out in the background and they were vital to the plot. So to understand who the fuck they were and what the fuck was happening you had to be familiar with... well all of DC comics actually.

Anyway this rant is getting long and unhinged and I don't think there's a point so I'm going to cut myself off even though I have so much more to say on the topic. I think my general point is just that I didn't enjoy watching the later seasons and it's chill if you did and we should all respect each other's opinions ✌️

#rant #oh also the messaging sucked #the messages itself were fine. like 'you should go to therapy if you are depressed' and 'respect people's religions' and #'figuring out your gender/sexual identity is chill af' #those are great messages. the content is great and i don't disagree #BUT HOLY FUCK #yo Zatara ranting about his religion to Fate for 15 minutes is not how you get a message across #messages are supposed to be like themes and subtle points of the narrative #it's not supposed to be a fucking psa where the characters just talk for half the episode and say the message verbatim to the audience #itd be like if in season one M'gann stood up and spent ten minutes talking about the damaging psychological effects of body image issues #and everyone else just sat there and nothing happened and M'gann just kinda spoke about it #or if Artemis was just like 'im going to do a presentation on why child abuse is bad' #its just. thats not. thats not how messages in a plot work #but they didn't develop the characters enough. so instead of s1 where the messages were blatantly obvious #we just had side character zatara who we know nothing about talk about religion like he was doing a PSA for kindergartners #because we don't know his character and he had zero focus so that was literally the only way to get the message across #and im sorry but that's bad writing. if you are sacrificing character plot and narrative for a message then maybe scrap the message #or you know actually have a developed character do the message. like write the message through a developed character so it doesn't #need to be spoonfed to the audience like we're five year olds learning different shapes from a teacher

[qqueenofhades]

Wondering if you've seen that FB post about Garcy&violence against women? What's your take on this? To me it's insane - I enjoy all kinds of weird shit in fiction, but don't wish it happened to me. I'm a bit concerned that our ship may never sail to the sunset 'cause of similar (exaggerated, in my opinion) voices. Aaaand... didn't I see the traces of psychological abuse in Lyatt/Wyjess?

Welp.

Disclaimer: I hate talking about/thinking about/participating in any way in fandom drama, and my policy for as long as my blog has existed has been to ignore it. Some people have to be very informed on it and reacting to it all the time and etc, and whatever works for them, but I just can’t do it. Fandom is my happy bubble and I take active steps to cut out that sort of energy, because it will mess me up. It’s one of the reasons I’m not on twitter. I am a serious introvert and sensitive person and just don’t have the spoons to constantly manage it. So.

That said, you asked, and I do have some thoughts on this, so this will basically be the post I make about it, and then go back to my happily oblivious corner.

Timeless was a very chill fandom, shipping-wise, in s1, and it was small enough (and ships were not the main focus of the plot, even if potential existed) that we mostly or entirely avoided ship wars. However, in s2, we had a lot more shippy content, angst for a main ship, a returned dead wife, a love square, the development of an enemies-to-lovers ship, and some open-endedness about how they’re going to treat the main ship going forward, all of which leads to more friction and backbiting in fandom. This happens to most TV shows, unfortunately, and Timeless certainly isn’t as bad as other fandoms that I’ve seen, but it definitely is not the same atmosphere that it was. Which is disappointing, but again, not surprising. You have vocal fans of one thing on twitter, and then vocal fans of another, and no firm announcement of season 3, so… yeah. The natives become restless.

As for Garcy, I honestly remember the exact same thing happening with CS for years. There were many vocal antis who called the ship abusive, that it promoted violence against women, that Hook was horrible/a rapist, etc etc, that it made Emma “weak,” that it sent a bad message, so on and so forth, and they spent a lot of time bombarding the showrunners with their views. (The whole OUAT fandom turned pretty toxic and cliquish the more the show went on, unfortunately, and was one of the reasons in me leaving.) This didn’t make much difference to the ultimate writing of CS; they still ended up married/endgame with a baby. Anyway, the point is, fandom noise, even if there’s a lot of it, doesn’t usually massively or unduly influence the showrunners’ writing decisions. It’s a little different with Timeless, since they are still talking about what to do in s3, but all of that has pointed to more focus on Garcy, not less. In his TiffTalks interview recently, Shawn Ryan didn’t pull punches in talking about how badly Wyatt screwed up and raising the question of whether it was too late for him to make it up to Lucy, and repeating about 500 times about Flynn’s feelings for Lucy and that being an important part of the show (and hinting that he has a different opinion on L/W from the fandom).

As well, there has been a serious surge of interest for Garcy this season (look, they asked MATT LANTER in an interview about the tons of support for Flynn/Lucy online, which… dude, what do you want the poor guy to say? He’s not involved in that ship and plays a character that is the opposing number to it. But anyway). As I said in my last ask, they wrote a certain amount of L/W content, and then cut or changed it, and treated the Garcy content in a way to make it clear that they wanted to preserve the canon possibility of them as something more than friends/partners. So yes.

I think the fandom reaction to every enemies-to-lovers ship, especially in the case of Garcy when it appears to threaten an established/main ship, reflects the tumblr “social justice fandom purity” culture, where everything that a fandom doesn’t personally like gets put through the “this is why my opinion is Woke” gristmill. In other words, it’s not enough that they don’t like Garcy (which is fine for them, honestly, people can ship whatever they want); they have to prove that it is Bad and Unhealthy (while, as you point out, being blind to valid textual criticism to be made of their preferred ship/male lead). Flynn stans criticize him freely and refer to him as the Garbage Lord (especially in s1), but as I have noted before, Wyatt is often shielded from the consequences of his actions both in canon text and fandom discourse, and they find even more thinly justified ways to bash on Flynn/Garcy instead. That is tiring, and it unfortunately does impact on my views of both the character and the ship. It’s also why I have to stay away from too much of it. I WANT to keep liking Wyatt and rooting for him, but to have his canon actions ignored and excused and twisted around is a little (or a lot) eye-rolling. It’s okay. We all stan fuckup characters. It makes them more interesting. But that doesn’t mean they’re not fuckups.

Honestly, there were many, many other ways they could have written this Jessica arc (as well as Flynn’s interactions with Lucy), but they didn’t. As I also keep saying, this kind of drama eventually happens in all fandoms, and Timeless did not escape it. Hopefully it can be prevented from getting too out of hand. But yes, the movement overall has been (far far more than I EVER expected) toward Flynn/Lucy, and I don’t know what the writers will decide on for s3. It is, however, not going to be influenced just by some annoying fans on facebook.

#fandom wank #fandom drama #fandom drama for ts #okay i've said my piece #back to my bubble #wyatt critical #anonymous #ask